Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2012.12.28

Just finished reading Richard Dawkins's book Climbing Mount Improbable, whose task is to defend evolution from the accusation that certain features of organisms could not possibly have achieved their brilliant design through a continuous series of viable steps, as evolution requires. He tackles several of the hardest cases. The hardest of all may be the eye, which he argues really was possible as a very long series of minor adjustments to the basic idea of a light-sensitive cell.

But the reason to buy the book is the last chapter, in which he confronts the distressing topic of What Goes On Inside of Figs. To wildly simplify, fig (Ficus) flowers are inside of the figs. Each fig species has a corresponding species of wasp that hatches in one fig and, if female, lives to transport pollen to a different fig, lay her eggs there, and die. But again, that's like saying that Hamlet is about a guy who's mad at his father-in-law; it's the endless infoldings and recursions and self-references that make the fig-wasp story enthralling and distressing in a way that invites comparison to the literary.

I've tried to explain the fig-wasp mutualism many times, and never have felt I'd grasped it. Dawkins goes all the way through it in a way that both explains it and acknowledges how astonishing it is, and while much of the book is beside the point for non-creationists, this chapter is worth the price of the book.

A fig is not a fruit but a flower garden turned inside out. It looks like a fruit. It tastes like a fruit. It occupies a fruit-shaped niche in our mental menus and in the deep structures recognized by anthropologists. Yet it is not a fruit; it is an enclosed garden and one of the wonders of the world. I am not going to leave this statement dangling as a self-indulgent profundity to be plucked by the 'sensitive' and baffle everyone else. Here is what it means.

Those last two sentences are classic Dawkins, consciously engaging in "self-indulgent profundity" only to cut off any mythmaking that this might encourage. Dawkins sometimes sounds like he's training his reader in awe management. Feel the amazement, he says, then accept that plausible explanation for it all. Learn to feel awe without needing to make myths. Other writers, like Stephen Jay Gould, are better than Dawkins at allowing the awe to survive the explanation of science; Dawkins never avoids seeming a bit of a killjoy. But what he does he does well, and he explains the astonishing story of figs and wasps -- in its several tiers of infolding complexity, very well. After laying out the many cross-cutting layers of motivation and sabotage in the fig-wasp drama, he concludes:

Figs and fig wasps occupy the high ground of evolutionary achievement ... Their relationship is almost ludicriously tortuous and subtle. It cries out for interpretation in the language of deliberate, conscious, Machiavellian calculation. Yet it is achieved ... without brain power or intelligence of any kind. The players are a tiny wasp with a very tiny brain ... and a tree with no brain at all ... It is all the product of an unconscious Darwinian fine tuning, whose intricate perfection we should not believe if it were not before our eyes.

... and which, once grasped, changes our relationship to figs. To me as an American child, figs meant fig newtons, and sometimes squishy seedy fresh figs, and now and then a houseplant that seemed always to be dropping leaves. But since getting close to the diversity of figs in Australia, I've learned to feel toward the genus Ficus something that's amounts to admiration, curiosity, horror, and revulsion in roughly equal measures.

A few months ago, when last in an Australian grocery store, I considered buying a fresh fig, but then looked closely at the hole in the bottom of each fruit, which can bear a distinct resemblence to an anus. It's not that busy a hole: only female wasps pass through it, and only on entry does its abrasions strip off their wings. But it's enough to remind me that a fertilized fig would be full of dead wasps, wasp guano, crushed waspy ambitions, and indeed everything else that would accumulate, as karma or compost, in a flower garden.

Not only that, it would have been the site of dramas of Shakespearean subtlety, not the less dramatic because the competing desires lay in the genes of the players rather than their consciousness. It doesn't matter that this fig I might buy is sterile; it's still a stage set for the same overwrought opera. It's just rather a lot to just put in your mouth, and chew on.

2012.03.24

Why did I lose the trail? And why, having lost it, did I not want it back right away?

Disaster narratives always begin with scenes of exaggerated innocence. On my day off from work on this New Zealand trip, I made a dash for the Coromandel rainforest. It was a brilliant day, and as the road weaved through the screaming green, every babbling creek and towering rata [pic at right] announced I was in well-earned paradise. When I stopped quickly at a roadside rest area, I didn’t intend to stay, but then noticed a little path into the woods.

Not a real trail, just a quick trace of brief roadside adventures. It led quickly up a hill, diminishing as it went. Men climb hills, so I climbed.

Finding not much of a view from the top, I started down, and lost the trail at once. Going up it was one of those not-really-a-trail trails. Going down it wasn’t there at all.

Of course I should have been more careful, as trails are harder to see downhill than up. Surely I could have stopped at once, taken stock, retraced my steps.

But I was delighted. How young it made me feel to have made a reckless mistake so characteristic of someone younger – or at least of more reckless men than I. This was much more fun than the usual pursuits of men in their 40s, like buying ridiculous cars and driving them too fast. Of course, my delight was reckless too, in the same vein. Isn’t delight always reckless? And is self-observed recklessness dumber or smarter than the more innocent kind?

For a few fateful minutes, such thoughts and their echoes bore me downhill. Feeling sure of the general direction, I let the forest lead me. I could still hear sounds of the road, and felt briefly sure that any path I struck would return me to it.

The delight had another source. To me at least, the New Zealand rainforest feels comfortable and safe. [Photos here are not from the adventure, as I carried no camera.] Compared to other temperate rainforests I've known (Oregon, Australia, Chile) New Zealand’s is remarkably free of hazard. No dangerous animals. No stinging plants. Ensaring vines, of which more in a moment, but nothing like Australia's Calamus vines, which grab you with small, sharp hooks and don't let go. (Hence their common name: lawyers.) The only way you can kill yourself in a New Zealand forest is by exposure to cold or by falling, possibly impaling yourself on a sharp dead branch or going over a cliff. And lacking other ways to perish, rash adventurers take these options more often than you'd think.

But it was a sunny day, and why would I fall? Well, now that you mention it, the downward slope was getting steeper, footing more uncertain. In this waterlogged, deep-rotted ground, how far would my foot sink? Is that a solid log I’m stepping on, or a log rotted to the consistency of a sponge?

For hikers, downhill slips are a koan brought to life: When your foothold betrays you, you can only save yourself by stepping quickly even further down, with even less surety of your footing. In this moment, the universe says: Because I have betrayed you, you must trust me.

The first betrayal came soon enough. My foothold slipped so completely that I simply slid down the steep hill, feetfirst, through the deep layer of decaying plant matter. The friction pulled my shirt over my head, so that I slid blind and caressed by warm, wet, sawdusty hands. I knew I might be impaled at any moment, but the sensation was deeply pleasant, and I was almost sad to come to rest, one leg on each side of a tree fern.

At once, plant-recognition was surety. With a glance at the tree-fern’s trunk, I thought "Cyathea medullaris!" At once the fern was a friend, and thus a more reliable support. But as I got to my feet, leaning hard on my new familiar, I looked up to see the brilliant silver undersides of the fronds. "No!” I thought. “Cyathea dealbata!" The fern that launched 1000 rugby teams! And with that, the fern trunk seemed firmer still, even more ready to be relied on. This pleasure of recognition shoved aside a less encouraging botanical fact: Tree fern trunks are not solid structures so much as artfully thatched piles of dead, wet leaves.

Recognition implies friendship, which implies reliability. That’s metaphor rather than logic, but doesn’t everyone long for these metaphorical friendships – with cities or landscapes if not with plants? The thing named is a thing that’s in its place, not likely to surprise you.

For years I’d studied forest flora on my trips to New Zealand, so this forest felt familiar. It featured a low canopy not much above the shrub layer, with only isolated trees punching higher. So between the shadows there was some sun, efficiently recycled on shiny leaves. About half the plants were known to me, mostly species of Hebe, Coprosma, Leptospermum, Metrosideros, and Phormium as well as the abundant feather-duster shaped Nikau palms.

Those plants, left to themselves, would have formed a pleasant and manageable forest, like the overgardened “rainforest” of Auckland’s central park, the Domain. But the true antipodean rainforest begins with vines. North American rainforests have nothing like the entangling complexity of their southern peers. Here, two human-scale characters were there to cling and confound.

Supplejack (Ripogonum scandens) presents endless stiff, black stems, about 2 cm wide with bamboo-like joints every 20 cm or so. There is no hope of cutting or breaking them. Supplejack wanders around the forest, growing up, over, and down in no particular pattern, hanging itself casually from trees. Now and then it branches to construct open framelike structures. If you move a piece of it out of your way, all the attached pieces move in unison, usually placing another stem in your way or raising a new bar for you to climb over or under. Moving through supplejack is like bushwhacking while solving a Rubik’s Cube.

A more intimate challenge is bondage fern, my term for Lygodium articulatum. Imagine a typical fern frond, but with the stalk growing indefinitely. The result is a vast entanglement of these thin, twisting stalks. Bondage fern's stalks are barely a millemeter thick but surprisingly tough, capable of taking much of my weight as I tried to break through them. Over and over I would push forward and suddenly find myself bound, ankles inseparable or a hand held behind my back, always at angles where brute force was hopeless. There was nothing to do but back up very slowly, as though from a threatening snake, until it released me.

I keep telling myself, and keep forgetting, that on rainforest hikes I should carry small pruning clippers.

All this went on for far too long. I vaguely sensed that I’d gotten a bit to the left of my original path, and sought to bear right, but the steep slopes confounded my navigational sense. Almost the whole adventure happened on slopes of 45-70 degrees. (Adventurers’ tales often exaggerate slopes, so I kept checking: Yes, the land in front of my eyes is the same distance away as my feet, which means 45 degrees. Now it’s only half as far, which means close to 70.)

Finally, I noticed the sun. For an hour I’d been groping downhill in what felt like a westward direction, encouraged by sounds of the road that seemed to be that way. But it was midday. I was in the southern hemisphere. The sun was on my left.

This was a problem.

What’s fascinating is how early I noticed this, how easy it was to deny at first, and how long it took to truly register, as though I were an oil baron hearing vague reports of climate change. Alarm grew slowly and distantly, like the input of junior interns, easily brushed aside in the vigor of my thrashing. As the alarm grew louder, how easy it was to slide into denial! Suddenly I was thinking intently about declination, the difference between magnetic and geographic north. In the North American west, this difference is over 20 degrees, enough to be an issue when navigating by the sun or stars. Somehow it must be at work here, I thought, because the sounds of the road are in front of me, so this must be the right direction!

Finally there came the tipping point. Which is more likely to be an illusion: the direction from which the road sounds seem to be coming, or the position of the sun?

In an instant, my thrashing stopped like a shorted-out circuit and I nearly collapsed in a cocoon of green. Taking a deep breath, and aware that technology was best left out of this tale, I sadly pulled out the Blackberry. Its primitive GPS feature usually works only on hilltops where it’s least needed. As I’d thrashed, I’d glanced at it now and then, usually to see whether it would say “GPS is temporarily unavailable” or “Waiting for GPS” -- messages of identical meaning that the Blackberry gods vary for our entertainment. Now it gave me a location, but not a direction. It showed me alarmingly far from the road, but not which way would take me there.

Yes, but I had the sun, saying something I didn’t want to hear. So I rang a colleague in Auckland, asked him to poke around my environs on Google Earth, verify whether this valley really was leading down eastward, away from the road. He did, while also reminding me, gently and constructively, that yes, at midday, the sun really must be in the north. I had descended the wrong side of the hill.

When we don’t like the facts of geometry, we keep collecting data (a common phenomenon in my profession, and one that I’m often commenting on). There was no need to call my colleague, really no reason to pull out the Blackberry at all. Midday in New Zealand the sun must be in the north. Declination might throw it off by 20-some degrees, but that won’t put it on the other side of the sky.

The last hour of thrashing, back up the hill on a new sun-guided vector, was less delightful, more confronting, yet inside those feelings, serene. The vector’s interface with the topography was appalling: I was told to climb 70-degree slopes (yes, the ground before my eyes was that much closer than my feet) and through ever-thickening tangles of supplejack and bondage fern.

Several watercourses were to be crossed, including a deep one bridged only by a high, algae-slimed log bathed in continual mist. This must be a scene of suppressed trauma, as my courage has always cratered in log-over-creek situations. Partway across, I slipped. The slip was my reward for not trusting, of course: I’d been unconsciously positioning (i.e. unbalancing) myself so that if I slipped my legs would go down on opposite sides of the log, preventing a total fall. Sure enough, I ended up not just embracing the log with my legs but sliding partway off on one side, so that I hung from the crook of one knee and some desperate slippery handgrip. My water bottle fell and tumbled well down the creek, far beyond my reach. I slid the rest of the way across, a lizard minus the grace, feeling at once humiliated and relieved.

Eons (20 minutes) later, I approached the road. It was far above me, and the bank grew steeper as I climbed to it. The slope was held together by New Zealand Flax, a plant with long, straplike leaves that clings with remarkable firmness to near-vertical earth. At times my entire weight hung from a single plant as I hauled myself upward. The leaves were lightly serrated, delivering continuous cat-scratches on my hands. But I'm used to cats.

It was the very end of the adventure that looked most like an adventure film. The slope curving upward toward verticality, partly bare rock and partly spiking masses of flax. The raggedness of my flax-scratched hands. The grandiose (when not flailing) heroics implied in climbing such a structure. The certainly that with my water bottle gone, I really must get out soon. And of course, the sad banality of the road itself, where an adventure film would have cut away to the hero celebrating with friends.

But the story is still a comedy, and not just because it ended well. In comedy the ridicule of the hero is gentle and continuous, rather than stored up, as in tragedies, to crash down at the end. I could have gotten killed of course, and the New Zealand Herald (on page 9 below the fold by an ad for panel beaters) would have called it a tragedy. But a middle-aged guy who perceives his foolishness as evidence of vigor, who lectures professionally about the reliability of geometry yet briefly resists the position of the sun, who constructs counterfactual realities rather than admit that he’s spent a hour in vain, who slides happily out of control down steep slopes yet cowers before a creek-crossing log, this is not, thank God, a tragic figure.

2011.08.25

Suppose you're walking along a path in a forested city park when you see very tall man walking toward you, seemingly covered in blood. It's all over his shirt, face, hands. His intense, stoic gaze is directly on the path in front of him, as though he won't see you even when you pass.

Do you (a) turn and run screaming in the other direction, (b) keep walking but quietly call police on your cellphone, (c) stop and ask "Heavens, are you ok?" In Vancouver's idyllic Stanley Park, the prevailing response appears to be (c), which is a nice surprise.

In fact, the two ladies had already passed me when they finally turned and asked "are you ok?" Perhaps they needed to get close enough to verify that the blood was flowing from my own newly-carved wounds, and thus was probably mine. Still, it was a nice gesture.

Was the blood worthwhile? To judge, one must know the objective: Rubus parviflorus, the thimbleberry.

Though obviously a Rubus, like all raspberries, the thimbleberry is scarcely a food at all. It comes off as a fragile cap, hollow inside like a raspberry, but barely a millimeter thick. Connoisseurs place it lightly on the tongue and then press it slowly against the roof of the mouth, letting its sharp taste flow outward like a ravishment. To me the taste is a mixture of raspberry and rhubarb, but stripped of sweet distractions and ramped up to an ecstatic pitch. Individual berries can seem as different as sopranos, as though inviting legions of specialized fans.

All this flows from a fruit so thin that it's almost not there. It yields almost no nutrition, no substance, no energy, nothing but a pure sensation. It's easy to declare it ethereal, an image of perfection, like the single virgin in a tower whose beauty ennobles a lifetime of knightly gore. So there's something noble about risking bloodshed for them, something that would be lacking if mere blackberries had been at stake. (Blackberries, too, would muddy the tale with their own potential for violence. They have fierce thorns, while the thimbleberry goes, as the botanists say, "unarmed.")

So yes, the gashes in my face, which would have been tough and sexy if it had been a bicycle accident, arose from a berry-picking accident. The archetypal scene:

Having climbed into the thimbleberries and successfully found bliss there, the time came to get back down. Most middle aged men will understand the psychology of the moment, when one confronts the need for a 1.5m jump over the ditch to the gravel path. In short, the required jump looks like something that the man remembers doing many times, and he momentarily forgets that the last of those times was more than a decade ago.

So he crashes. The front foot hits the far side of the ditch, and as it slides down the man slams headlong onto the path with some forward momentum. His chin, left temple, and the brow above his left eye all touch reverently to the gravel and slide along it for a few inches, surrendering to its sharpness.

When he comes to rest, he notices first not the blood, but that his water bottle is lying on the path right in front of him, spilling slowly into the dust. It feels tragic, a waste, as though the water were blood. But he can't stop it in time, and when he finally grabs it it's been reduced to a useless husk. This moment is so poignant that the discovery of real blood, all over his shirt and pouring from his face, feels like tasteless exaggeration, too much literalness spoiling such a lovely metaphor.

But were the thimbleberries worth it? If I were back in a British-influenced country I'd put cost-benefit analysts the question, as the British can quantify the "welfare value" of a perfect autumn breeze. But I'm in North America, where cost-benefit analysis is cruder. So the thimbleberries, like the virgin in a tower, are simply not in the same dimension as the blood and gore, and I can rejoice in the impossibility of comparing them.

2011.07.24

In this rushed and shriveled Pacific Northwest summer, I race to catch up with the salmonberries.

They're almost gone now. If you're in the Northwest and haven't stopped for one, you'd best get into the woods or thickets today.

Some botanical names both inform and sing. I'll never enjoy saying Pseudotsuga menziesii for douglas-fir, but my mouth loves saying Rubus spectabilis almost as much as it loves tasting them. (Rubus is the genus of raspberries and blackberries, so this is the spectacular Rubus, which it is).

Flamboyance is rare in the deep, dark woods, but salmonberries are as individual as drag queens. Each bush produces berries of its own distinct color. They're all somewhere on a spectrum from yellow to purple, but in any thicket, the sameness of each bush's berries stands out against its neighbors. It's a nice effect when the bushes are all tangled up in each other, like lovers refusing to dissolve into oneness. Darker colors develop from a yellow base that remains in the interior, so that darker berries appear to be glowing from within.

Ripeness has nothing to do with color; hikers who don't know this tend to leave the tasty yellow ones. Instead, ripeness is signalled only by fullness, and a tendency to begin very gradually coming loose, hanging evocatively from the mount, ready to break free. The sense of availability is almost erotic.

Opinions on taste differ, but I seem to have enough inter-sensory links that I can taste visual beauty up to a point. The sight of a salmonberry going into my mouth must affect my taste of it. To me, those little green hairs on each drupe are just a nice bit of fiber, and the taste seems to glow from within, as the berry does.

2011.01.25

When you turn a camera on Angophora costata, they'll seem to be performing for you.

But I can't photograph how they really look to someone hiking the forests around Sydney. The curious color and what I can only call a vaguely animal presence, especially when seen in the very corner of your eye. They are the kind of tree that makes you feel the forest is watching you, maybe even making jokes about you behind your back.

Flesh-colored would be the easy term, though of course they weren't that until 1770 when people of that color arrived. But I'm of that color, so I'm ready to see human arms waving in the forest.

Saturation is a challenge. Did I exaggerate the color in the pic above, or understate it below? Who knows. Angophora is one those complex sense-impressions that never quite comes through in a photo.

I'm fond of this image of an Angophora flowing over a rock. You can sense the curious roughness of the bare surface, again fleshlike, and perhaps a bit feminine

Like the closely related Eucalyptus, Angophora often makes a big show of shedding bark. It surrounds itself with a deep mound of slowly-decaying matter, as though preparing its own pyre. The shedding happens mostly right at the base, leaving the distinctive bare trunk.

Often the mound of droppings is easier to look at than the tree.

So I frequently find myself dealing with an Aussie tree by studying the litter below it. Sometimes this happens becuase the tree is huge and its foliage is lost in the canopy. With Angophora, well, the rich textures of the droppings suggest that they, as much as the towering form, can tell me what this thing really is.

2010.10.30

If I had to represent California with a single plant genus, I couldn't choose a tree. California's trees are the defining features of ecosystems -- the gray pine belt, the red fir belt, the redwood coast, the oak-studded grasslands -- but none embraces the whole diversity of the state.

But across most of California, at most elevations and in a huge range of ecosystem types, there's some kind of Arctostaphylos -- a manzanita.

"Manzanita," of course, is Spanish: "Little apple."

But of course it's more closely related to blueberries than to apples.

Wherever it appears, manzanita is so peculiar, so unlike anything around it, and so adept at revealing its own inner ilfe, that it always draws my attention. And while they extend down into Mexico and creep in prostrate forms through the Pacific Northwest toward the arctic, the big in-your-face manzanita shrub -- with its warmly colored bark, its constantly twisting branches, and its stiff exclamatory leaves -- is mostly a creature of California.

Like the divaricating shrubs of New Zealand, manzanita branches seem to bend at every growth bud, yielding an endlessly wavy structure. Like some New Zealanders, too, its leaves are sparse enough to create interior rooms that draw the eye.

The bark is red in age, closer to butterscotch in youth -- colors so specific and insistent that one wonders about their evolutionary purpose.

The rich colors of the bark are echoed in dropped leaves, as though both arose from some common chemical process.

They are often adept at filling wind-sculpted gaps in rock, completing a larger geometric shape.

And of course, they die magnificently, a screaming silver-white that recalls New Caledonian ferns. (Is my taste in plants too operatic, and if so, why don't I like opera more than I do?)

Indeed, manzanita is never more striking than when partly-dead. Often, the living tissue is a sinuous strip on just one side of the branch. It can look like a fluid coating, not part of the branch at all.

Of course, it's true of all branches and trunks that life is just at the surface, not within. But few plants are quite so adept at illustrating the point.

Never have I seen a plant that engages so intricately with its own dead remains.

2010.09.03

I happened to be in Australia's small capital city, Canberra, on September 1, which for odd reasons lodged deep in the Aussie psyche is considered the official first day of spring. Every time I turned on the local ABC radio station (the Aussie equivalent of NPR in America or the BBC in Britain, and commonly known as "Auntie") somebody was talking about what was happening in their gardens. The night before had been the first frostless night in weeks, and the plants were swinging into action.

Auntie's reliable voices covered the news with the same calm but intense focus that they bring to everything, announcing the blooming of theHardenbergiain exactly the tones they'd use to describe the latest movements of the Taliban or the breaking news of the Labor Party's deal with the Greens. And indeed, these masses of tiny purple pea-flowers were exploding everywhere.

2010.08.29

Amsterdam was warm and colourful during my summer visit, but even in summer I'm always scanning the landscape trying to imagine a winter view. In high latitudes, especially, summer is always a tease, a rug that will be whipped out from under you as soon as you relax and accept it as real. For many years, too, I've lived in landscapes that offer much that is constant all year. Around Sydney, all trees and shrubs are evergreen and ephemeral annuals are a small part of the effect.

But in the Netherlands, the ephemeral looks ephemeral. Among the grey buildings, grey streets, and grey-green canals, ephemeral plants look like explosions. It constantly feels as though if I came back in an hour, they'd be gone.

And none more so than the bizarre and eruptive Alcea rosea. Hollyhocks, you'd say, but "hollyhock" is a cutesifying word, a word that you'd trust to be alone with your five-year-old child. It's quite wrong for such an eruptive, rushing and vaguely threatening creature, exploding from random cracks in the pavement.

That's the remarkable thing: They're everywhere in July, but none of them appear to be planted. I'm sure they're ripped out of they get in the way, but otherwise, they seem to happen wherever they happen.

The Dutch are great gardeners, and great city planners, but in this most tended and intentional of landscapes, the hollyhocks seem to be coming out of another dimension, a universe hidden in a pavement crack, full of alien life.

2009.06.05

It's remarkable that for all the tropical wandering I've done, I'd never seen this giant water lily before. It's the biggest draw at the main botanical garden in Mauritius, but like most things on that small volcanic island, it's from far away.

And if you think botanical names are just for geeks, go ahead and call this the Giant Water Lily. Its real name, Victoria amazonica, almost qualifies as a short poem or demi-haiku about Britannia's masculine confidence in the service of a fighting queen. The Brits didn't conquer the Amazon of course, but they were always on the lookout for spectacular tropical plants to extend the horticultural dimensions of empire. Wikipedia tells the story of the 19th century race to be the the first to cultivate the plant and bring it to flower in Britain, with nothing but coal-fired heating to protect it from England's winter.

Water lilies are engaging mostly because they hide the machinery, thus satisfying the human craving for compelling illusions. Unless you can really see into the water, each pad and each flower looks like a separate happening. The stalks that hold the plant together underwater are dark red, a little darker than the red of the outside pad wall. You have to look closely to see them.

Wikipedia says the flower is white the first day it appears, turning pink the second. If that's true the flowers must be very fleeting, because here most of them were white.

New leaves look a little rougher as they unfurl.

I suspect the leaves are the real reason this species so captivated the British. They can get to 3m (!) in diameter, but the ones in Mauritius are only about 1m across. The wall around each leaf, about 10cm high, makes each seem a small stage. It's hard to resist the temptation to step on one, perhaps try to ride it somewhere.

2009.04.19

When I was about 12 years old, I got my first inkling that things that seemed really terrible could also be very funny. I had been walking home from the bus when a little yappy chihuahua got too much leash from its distracted owner, and ran up to bite me on the calf. It was the first time I'd been bitten by a dog, so it was Great Rite of Passage, freighted with luscious, ennobling worries about infection and disease.

When I told my mother, I used tones that made the importance clear, and even inserted a dramatic pause: "Mom, I was bitten (pause) by a chihuahua." And she laughed. Hard. Gasping for breath, really. And then she explained to her mortified son that his pause was to blame: "You said 'I was bitten ...' and paused, so I visualized this huge angry dog. Then when you said 'by a chihuahua' the big dog just imploded in a way that was very funny."

Something similar happens with the phrase "world's tallest moss."

Phil and I encountered this Dawsonia in a rainforest gully on Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains. It is, strictly speaking, the world's tallest genus of mosses. There are several species, and I have no idea which one this is. Some online sources suggest it can reach 1m in height, amazing for a plant with no vascular system to conduct nutrients efficiently. UBC Botanical Garden notes that "some cells differentiate into analogues of the water and
nutrient-conducting cells of vascular plants, while others become the
thick-walled cells necessary to support the free-standing height." So it may be a little like an early draft in the evolution of vascular systems that later freed plants to reach for the sky.

So yes, the world's tallest moss. Or if you the sensation of semantic implosion, the world's tallest ... (pause) ... moss.